Bonn climate change convention: searching for a successor to Kyoto

I'm sending this from the first floor of the Hotel Maritim in Bonn, the temporary stage for the latest round of the global climate change negotiations that will build to a dizzying, crowded climax in Copenhagen at the end of the year, when the UN will try and agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocols.

What has been happening this week is five days of so-called "informal talks" but the extraordinary machinery of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is still on show. There are 2,500 people here, for a start, delegates from 192 countries and observer bodies: from Sweden's team of 40, to a pair of diplomats from Malawi and a man in a black tie from the Holy See.

The sight of a full plenary session -- as we had yesterday -- is at once an affirming display of global democracy, and completely impenetrable, thick with protocol and stumbling repetitions. If it was something less than then the fate of the planet at stake, the relatively unknown bureaucrats milling around me, chiselling away at this year's climate deal -- it is currently 199 pages long -- might be a curiosity for political scientists or anthropologists interested in the grand multilateral experiment that the UNFCCC represents.



But unfortunately that is not the case. Whatever is agreed at Copenhagen in December will govern the politics of climate change for the next decade, the crucial ten years during which scientists agree that the world's carbon emissions must peak and then start to fall -- and fast -- if the planet is to have any chance of avoiding the 2 degree rise in temperature that marks the threshold of dangerous climate change. The experiment is all too real.

I'm spending this week interviewing the delegates at the heart of the rigmarole, nosing into unmarked rooms and eavesdropping on people's lunches, all with a view to understand how the talks really work, so when it comes to Copenhagen we can have an idea of the process and the personalities that hold our future in their hands.

Sam Knight's article on the Bonn talks will appear in the October issue of Prospect.